Need For Speed Most Wanted: Hands-on

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Bounty hunting with EA's next-gen racer.

By Douglass C. Perry

Perhaps the most visually impressive game to come from Electronic Arts this holiday on Xbox 360 is Need For Speed Most Wanted on Xbox 360. If you're not convinced by the hand-crafted car models or the streams of wind flowing off all points of the cars, and you're not really into being chased by cops, it's nonetheless impossible to ignore the game's brilliant lighting, which illuminates the entire game with the brilliance of natural sun, shadow and everything in between, the way Gran Turismo 3 A-Spec once blew PS2 gamers away in the summer of 2001.

The playable nearly-finished build we saw showed off a strong jump from the eyes-on build we saw about one month ago at EA's headquarters. AND, this we got to play.

Not so shockingly, NFS Most Wanted plays almost exactly like the current generation versions. It's significantly prettier than any of the current gen games, even if the gamut of qualities -- handling, speed, grip, acceleration, and all these things combined to create "feel" -- are 98% the same. The build we played delivered realtime dynamic lighting that created superb shadows off the cars, trees, and other objects, plus, we got to play a level that showed off a rather large, intricate environment.

Unlike the mode Cost of State, in which you try to ring up as much property damage as possible, Bounty Mode combines property damage with illegal maneuvers. So, you race across a network of streets, freeways, side-streets, with the goal or avoiding the cops and breaking as many laws as possible. What kind of illegal activity are we talking about? The range isn't shocking, but it's nonetheless a great videogame challenge: Driving on the wrong side of the street, hitting pedestrian cars, ramming cop cars, driving off road, and damaging environments, to name a few.

I slammed the pedal to the medal and had as many as 12 or so cops chasing me simultaneously. Using basic peripheral eyesight and the use of your map, you can see the blue arrows (cops on the radar) as they pass by you on a freeway. The cops are relatively smart. When reaching a split in the road, you can feign in one direction and then swerve in another, or you can ram them, tip them, or simply blast past them using nitro.

You'll have a few features on hand to aid your reckless cause: GameBreaker and SpeedBreaker. The GameBreaker consist of interactive environments such as gas stations, giant tire signs, and water silos. Identified on screen by a marker, these spots represent destinations where you can nail multiple cops simultaneously, or simply blow something up for fun. Naturally, the idea is to drive under a giant tire display, smash the legs from under the stand, and watch in the in-game cutscene as the following cops are crushed by the collapsing tire. You can do this same thing, including a giant explosion, with gas stations, too. Only here, the visceral thrill is far greater.

I played Need For Speed Most Wanted right after playing PGR3, and I expected to see and feel a giant difference in looks and speed. I was a little surprised to see that NFS Most Wanted held it own with solid visuals and a good sense of speed. There were visual hitches at several points in this one, meaning that certain parts of the world had to load in and caused a stutter, but the game isn't optimized or final, so we're unsure if this will appear in the final version. In any case, I'm feeling good about this one.